ARTICLES ABOUT ALTGELD GARDENS BY DATE - PAGE 2

A Chicago police officer was shot in the leg Thursday night in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood on the Far South Side, but the wound was not life-threatening and he was later joking with the police superintendent at a hospital. The officer, 27 and two years on the force, was responding to a call of shots fired around 9:15 p.m. when he and another plainclothes officer approached a group of people in a parking lot near the 13200 block of South Langley Avenue, police said. One of the people, holding his waistband, ran away and the officers chased him, according to Sup. Garry McCarthy said. The person turned around and fired and hit one of the officers in the thigh, police said.

At least three people were killed and at least 17 others wounded, including nine teenagers, in shootings across the city late Friday night and early Saturday morning. Two sisters were shot in the head in the 2300 block of North Harding Avenue in the Logan Square neighborhood at about 4:40 a.m., police said. One woman, identified as Isabella Martinez, 22, of the Harding Avenue address, was found dead at the scene and the other sister, 35, was hospitalized in serious condition, police said, citing preliminary reports.

Within a month this summer, Gov. Pat Quinn beefed up laws intended to protect poor and minority communities from toxic pollution and cleared the way for a coal-to-gas plant in a low-income Chicago neighborhood where people already breathe some of the nation's dirtiest air. The apparent contradiction is mobilizing community activists on the city's Southeast Side to fight what they see as a new wave of highly polluting industries concentrated in...

A 29-year-old man was shot dead during a late-night fight at his home in the Altgeld Gardens public housing complex on the city's Far South Side after insulting the gunman's mother, Chicago police said today. A small quarrel in the 600 block of East 133rd Street quickly escalated into a brawl involving more than 100 people that ended with a man pulling a handgun and shooting the victim in the chest at about 10:25 p.m. Sunday in an Altgeld Gardens parking lot, police said, citing preliminary reports.

The office for the environmental justice organization People for Community Recovery sits in the back of a strip mall in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood. Inside the office is a photograph of founder Hazel Johnson with President Bill Clinton and another of her and President George H.W. Bush. Johnson, who founded PCR and was known as the mother of the environmental justice movement, was one of several activists instrumental in persuading Clinton to sign an order designed to hold the Environmental Protection Agency accountable to minority communities disproportionately exposed to pollution.

A Cook County judge on Thursday sentenced a South Side man to 32 years in prison for the murder of Derrion Albert, a Fenger High School sophomore whose videotaped beating was shown around the world and came to symbolize youth violence in Chicago. Judge Nicholas Ford denied defense pleas for a minimal sentence for Silvonus Shannon, who was convicted by a jury of first-degree murder in January. Shannon, 20, hung his head at the ruling while his family wept quietly in the courtroom.

In the early 1980s, the cancer deaths of four little girls — whose bodies were so tiny they could fit in shoe boxes — forced Hazel Johnson to shift the focus of an organization she'd recently founded. Johnson had hoped People for Community Recovery, which she began in 1979, would advocate for repairs in her Far South Side Altgeld Gardens community. The residents' row houses often had little to no water pressure. The ceilings leaked. The odor in Altgeld — a throwback from the area's days as an industrial hub — stung their nostrils, and the water (which ran a light bronze color)

Altgeld Gardens residents who've gone without a public library for 10 months should have a new one by June. The old library in the public housing complex shut down in March after a pipe burst and flooded the facility. Last week, the Chicago Public Library Board approved a new library, which will be built in four unused classrooms in the Wheatley Child Parent Center at 902 E. 133rd Place. The walls will be knocked down to create one open space of about 4,000 square feet.

Kermilia Wellington, a senior at Fenger High School, wants to go to Southern Illinois University next year, but she doesn't have access to a computer to fill out the online application. "It's too late to apply to most schools. If I can't do it in time, I'm going to the Navy," said Wellington, 18, whose neighborhood library in the Altgeld Gardens public housing complex has been closed since it flooded in March. The closest library is now two bus rides away, she said. Wellington was among 20 Fenger students who showed up at Mayor Richard Daley's office Wednesday to protest the lack of a neighborhood library and school.

A federal judge on Monday instructed Chicago Public Schools to discuss transfer options with Fenger High School students who want to change schools because they feel unsafe following the beating death of a student. Ten Fenger students filed a lawsuit against the school system last week alleging that their right to a public education is being denied because the district will not allow them to transfer. "My clients want to go to school. They simply asked CPS to do everything reasonable to protect their safety," said Christopher Cooper, the students' attorney.